I'm sorry that the freedom to own property annoys you. Personally, I'm fucking pissed off about the freedom of speech. I think that idiots who can't tell the difference between right and wrong should just shut the hell up, right now.
But the difference between you and me is that I'm not calling for the abolition of the freedom of speech, or denying that it ever existed in the first place.
Hey, man. The administration was in favor of a caucus system. It was the Iraqi government that chose direct elections. Personally I think that caucuses would have been WAY better for the Iraqi people, but I also believe that even an imperfect democracy is better than none at all.
because an invading army told you to vote
What? Seriously... what? What the hell are you talking about? I'm assuming by "invading army" you mean the Coalition. They weren't even remotely involved in the election. The election was entirely the work of the Iraqi government. They announced last summer that an election would be held, they decided the date, they chose the method of casting ballots. The Coalition wasn't even remotely involved.
nowhere in the Oxford English dictionary does it mention that a nation to be sovereign has to be a democracy
You rely on a dictionary to tell you the intricacies of United States foreign policy? That might just be mistake #1.
In fact the word sovereign derives from monarchy
Um, no. The English word "sovereign" comes from an old French word that meant "empowered." In our language, "sovereign" means "possessing legitimate authority." The word has no connection whatsoever to the word "monarchy."
So spare me the "complexities" and the "moral obligations" that were so "imperative"
Okay, but...if you don't want to hear about them, shouldn't you quit bitching about the fact that you can't seem to understand them?
the Pentagon has said many times that they were not conducting official body counts. How can you cite an "official" count that does not exist as proof of anything?
Please read my post again, more carefully this time. The numbers I cited came from Iraqi morgue records, not from the Pentagon. Of course the Pentagon makes no effort to count Iraqi civilian casualties. How would they? When an Iraqi civilian gets caught by friendly fire or something, does that Iraqi's body get taken to a Coalition facility for burial? Of course not. It does, however, get taken to an Iraqi morgue, where they keep track of these things. Hence the numbers.
The fact still remains, your government decided to invade a sovereign country based on a claim that has proven to be false.
Um. How do you get from my "here are the various ways in which you are incorrect, and believe me when I say there are many of them" to "the fact still remains?" I mean, what with you being wrong and all, the point here is kind of that the fact does not still remain.
1. Iraq was not sovereign. It was under the iron fist of a tyrannical dictator.
2. The claims were not false; to the contrary, they were right on the money. Saddam was in flagrant violation of the terms of the 1991 cease-fire. He was actively pursuing proscribed weapons. He was actively engaged in terrorism.
See? Between #1 and #2, the "fact" does not still remain. You're wrong.
Just because Saddam was a bad person does not give you nor your ilk the right to invade another country
The fact that he was in violation of the Safwan Accords gave us the right. The fact that he was a bad person gave us the responsibility.
Then he wanted phony parliamentary elections that the citizens couldn't participate in.
I think you're thinking of the argument over caucuses versus direct elections. The administration was in favor of a caucus system, while some others wanted direct elections instead. I bet the people of Iowa would be surprised and disappointed to hear that you think caucuses are "phony."
It's only because the (Iranian!) religious fanatic Ayatollah Sistani
Sistani is Iranian by birth, but he left that country for Iraq when he was a young man because he subscribed to a different interpretation of Shia Islam than the one followed in Iran. Also, he's not a fanatic. He's really quite moderate as Islamic mullahs go. Iranian Shia consider him an apostate, in fact. So do Wahabbists, but hell, Wahabbists consider everybody to be apostates, including other Wahabbists.
even then, the voters don't know the names of the candidates they're voting for
Yes, I agree that it would have been better if the Iraqis had chosen a caucus system instead of a direct election. But progress is progress.
Bush made sure that elections were postponed until after the US election!!!
Um. The Iraqi government picked the date of the election, not the US government.
Now he's gloating over having single handedly brought democracy to Iraq!
Wow. Project much?
And you call the left hypocritical??
No, I call you hysterical. I can understand how you might be confused. The two words are infuriatingly similar in both spelling and pronunciation.
Finally, a sobering thought on this from an Iraqi blogger... riverbend)
The "Iraqi" blogger known as "Riverbend" was debunked about four months ago, I think. Turns out "she" is actually a fortysomething businessman from Saudi Arabia who made up completely false stories about what was going on inside Iraq, stories that got eaten up by leftists everywhere who pointed to them as proof that Iraq was in trouble. None of it, not one word, was true. Google will help you check your sources in the future.
It kind of bugs me that your idea of "always" only goes back to 1979.
It also kind of bugs me that your understanding of the Kurdish situation is so incomplete. Turkey has a significant Kurdish minority population. Some of those Kurds got together to form a Marxist revolutionary group called, variously, KADEK, the KGK, the HSK, the KHK and the PKK. This group adopted terrorist tactics in their campaign for "independence" (it's hard to apply that word to any totalitarian socialist group).
The Kurds of northeastern Iraq, by contrast, are committed to democracy and to capitalism. The KDP and the PUK are no more allied with the Marxist terrorists in Turkey than the Turks themselves are.
And the Shia of Iraq practice a very different sect of Islam than the Shia of Iran. Put simply, the Iranian mullahs are theocrats who believe that Islam should be at the heart of government, while the mullahs of Shia Iraq follow a more insular teaching that instructs them to stay out of politics and government. The two groups are like oil and water. The odds that they would ever join together in a political union are a big fat zero.
I appreciate your interest in the subject and your desire to get to the heart of the situation. But it sounds like you've got a lot to learn.
No. Wrong. Never. Unless your definition of "election" includes being forced under the threat of imprisonment and torture at the hands of the secret police to write down the name of a murderous dictator who seized power during a coup. I don't consider that an election. Neither does the United States Department of State.
Was Iraq invaded so that person could vote or because there were WMD's? Just curious
Both. There were many reasons why it was both pragmatically necessary and morally imperative to invade Iraq. I'm sorry this troubles you, but at some point you're gonna have to grow up and learn to deal with complexity.
the invasion of as SOVEREIGN country
Iraq was not sovereign. By definition, a country that's ruled by a dictator cannot be considered sovereign. Only legitimate governments are sovereign.
the death of tens of thousands of civilians
You do know that the number you're citing is complete bullshit, right? The official Iraq estimate of the number of noncombatants killed between March 19, 2003 and a few weeks ago is about 7,000. (The number is necessarily a little bit out of date.) That figure comes from official Iraqi morgue records. At least a third of those people were killed by the Fedayeen in Basrah alone. Of the remainder, the vast majority have been murdered by Islamic terrorists in bombings, machine-gun sprees and televised executions.
The number you're citing comes from a widely misreported study in The Lancet. The researchers found that the number of Iraqis civilians (not, repeat not non-combatants, but merely Iraqi citizens who were not in uniform when they were killed) killed since 3/19/03 was anywhere between 9,800 and 198,000. Irresponsible (or maybe just ignorant) journalists just split the difference and reported that "tens of thousands" Iraqis were killed.
This is, in point of fact, absolutely untrue. Just to summarize, it's untrue because (1) since the study was based on simple extrapolation, the margin of error on the Lancet study was so wide as to make the study useless, and (2) the Lancet study included every Iraqi who was not wearing an Iraqi military uniform when they were killed, meaning that at minimum several thousand Iraqi soldiers and members of the Fedayeen were wrongly included in the study.
Show of hands: Who here is sick and tired of this "You gave us your property for free, but rather than being grateful we're going to be pissed off that you held something back for yourself" attitude?
This article has produced thousands of page views, which directly translate into advertising revenue. Consequently, the people who operate the parent company that operates the parent company of the company that owns the "Slashdot" brand and that pays the staff's salaries will get to sleep on slightly bigger piles of money.
If you don't think that making fat cats even fatter is good, then the terrorists have already won.
Which is why, in the rest of the world, we were horrified by Bush's "you are either with us, or you are with the terrorists" speech.
I don't understand. Are you saying that you were distraught that interminable fence-sitting suddenly became unacceptable to the people on the one side of the fence who were under sustained and imminent threat of being murdered by the people on the other side of the fence?
If anyone can see a motive for the invasion of Iraq past keeping the American economy propped up by assuring the supply of oil (and, tangentially, making the interests that the Bush family represents billions), please present it to me.
Not to mention trade or the common defense. Anybody who denies enjoying US citizenship should discard all possessions that weren't manufactured or produced in the United States, and also should immediately report to the nearest British, French, Spanish, Mexican, Austrian, Turkish, German or Japanese embassy to apply for citizenship in one of those countries. It doesn't matter which one; at some point in the past two centuries, our federal government has defended us from them all.
It's not just about benefits and entitlements. We literally owe a debt of gratitude for our very liberty to the federal government which so often has employed the economic, diplomatic or military might of this nation to secure it for us.
The basis of our philosophy is that all people are entitled to certain basic civil rights, and that among those are the rights to life and liberty. We also recognize other fundamental civil rights like the right to own property and the right to religious expression.
These rights aren't granted to us by anybody. We're endowed with them by our Creator. And they're not just reserved for the citizens of a particular nation or the members of a particular class. Everybody has them.
This belief lies at the very basis of our entire political and social system. It's axiomatic.
You can express the opinion that you don't think that's how it should be, if you want to, but good luck. People have been trying to do that for hundreds of years now, and nobody yet has been able to.
the PATRIOT act has provided a means by which the government in the USA can more easily harrass those saying / printing / broadcasting ideas it does not like
Depending on how you look at it, that's either blatantly false, or true of every law we have.
Yes, the Federal government has the power to conduct investigations when terrorist activity is suspected. Does that translate into "the USA can harass you?" No, it does not. And if you really bend your definitions and conclude that it does mean that, then you could say exactly the same thing about every other law on the books.
it can now more easily punish such people with less dependence on legal niceties - hence the chilling effect.
How many times do I have to say it? There has been no chilling effect. None whatsoever. All there's been is a bunch of people sitting around on their fat asses talking about a chilling effect... which is exactly the sort of speech that was supposed to have been chilled. So the mere existence of this point of view is evidence of its invalidity.
the patriot act has a chilling effect on the freedom to read by state enquiry into reading
That's not a correct statement. If there were a "chilling effect" --there clearly has not been; library patronage remains unchanged --it would have been attributable to the wild misrepresentation of what USA PATRIOT actually was and what it actually did than by anything that was actually in the law itself.
And gag orders are most certainly not violations of the First Amendment. They're a situation in which the freedom to speak has to be balanced against the public safety, or against the right of the accused to receive a fair trial. They're not even slightly controversial.
You want to put an end to "chilling effects?" Stop running around claiming that they sky is falling. It isn't, and if you're doing anything at all, you'd doing more harm than good.
I thought it was accepted/. mantra that the patriot act has a chilling effect on free speech.
Oh, it very much is. It's an article of faith in numerous echo chambers. It is not, however, true in any way at all. As is patently obvious to anybody who's ever, you know, read the damn thing.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Recognize that? It's the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. That's not an excerpt. That's the whole thing, every word.
The First Amendment is not a declaration. It is a law, a law that prohibits the Congress of the United States from passing certain types of legislation. None of the amendments are declarations. They're laws that help to define the scope and jurisdiction of the power of the federal government.
The Constitution, in Article V, defines the process for amending the Constitution itself. Any part of the Constitution can be amended, as long as the process is followed. Entire chunks of the Constitution as they were ratified in 1789 are now null and void, having been amended in the years since. The first part of Article I section 3, for instance, no longer applies; it's been replaced by the 17th Amendment.
Because the first 10 amendments are part of the Constitution, they, too, can be amended, as described in Article V. If we --as a country --wanted to change the way the First Amendment is worded, we could do that. If we wanted to get rid of it altogether, we could do that too. Because we, the people, make the rules. We are not permanently bound to a document that was written more than two centuries ago. We can change it in any way we see fit.
So that whole "the first 10 articles of the Bill of Rights are NOT amendments" thing is completely wrong. And the "the first amendment can't be altered or abolished" thing is also completely wrong. Not a little bit wrong, not right in substance but wrong in detail. Like completely wrong.
Oh, you're wrong about citizenship, too. It's right there, in black and white, in the 14th Amendment: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. That PDF you linked to is all funny-business, and about as academically rigorous as those manifestos by dim bulbs who claim that they don't really have to pay income taxes because of some obscure technicality of the law that only they understand. It's armchair law from armchair philosophers and deserves no consideration whatsoever.
What the ABC News/Washington Post poll, which dates back to September 2003, actually said was that about two-thirds of Americans agreed at the time that the poll was taken that it was at least possible that Saddam Hussein was complicit in 9/11. There were five choices given: Very likely, somewhat likely, not likely, not at all likely and no opinion. Because of the way the question was worded, anybody who didn't fall into the "no" or "I don't know" camps was forced to give a positive response. The sum of the two positive responses was added up, and the front-page headline read "Americans think Saddam was behind 9/11," when the poll showed no such thing.
Given the facts of the case -- that one of Saddam's top lieutenants was personally involved in the meeting in Kuala Lumpur where the masterminds behind the attack finalized their plans --it is entirely reasonable to admit the possibility that Saddam has some level of complicity or involvement in 9/11. When polls show that most Americans hold an entirely reasonable opinion, some people see it as an opportunity to decry the American people as fools for admitting a possibility. I find that kind of sad.
Letting someone export a song to other formats does not in any way require them to store multiple formats on their servers.
Um. Yeah, it does. You can't go from AAC directly to MP3 without throwing away a significant amount of data. You have to go from AAC to AIFF and then to MP3, and then you have to encode at a much higher bit rate. Even so, due to the fairly crappy nature of MP3, you lose a good deal of sound quality in the process.
Going from AAC to AIFF, of course, is lossless; you don't lose anything. And going from AAC to AIFF and back to AAC is also effectively lossless. But going from AAC to another compressed format is a train wreck.
Seems like somebody who "knows technology" would, you know, know this.
Thank holy God in Heaven above that you're not in any kind of position to dictate Apple's policies or product roadmaps. You've got what has to be the worst idea I've ever actually seen in print.
It's worth pointing out that Jef Raskin was the inspiration for the Macintosh, but he really had very little to do with its development. So saying that "even Jef Raskin thinks it was a mistake" doesn't mean anything. He thinks everything about the Mac was a mistake, because he had something entirely different in mind.
Number of Mac-team-designed computers shipped: Upwards of 40 million. Number of Raskin-designed computers shipped: Um. How many Canon "Cats" ever made it out the door?
Defending the one-button mouse is like defending the Iraq war. It's an exercise in futility.
Speaking of irony, how wonderful that you should make a comment like this today, on the day of Iraq's first free election ever. Millions of people got to vote today for the first time in their lives.
The war needs no defense. Its virtues are obvious to all who care to open their eyes and look at them. Just like the one-button mouse.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry that the freedom to own property annoys you. Personally, I'm fucking pissed off about the freedom of speech. I think that idiots who can't tell the difference between right and wrong should just shut the hell up, right now.
But the difference between you and me is that I'm not calling for the abolition of the freedom of speech, or denying that it ever existed in the first place.
a system where you get to vote unknown candidates
... what? What the hell are you talking about? I'm assuming by "invading army" you mean the Coalition. They weren't even remotely involved in the election. The election was entirely the work of the Iraqi government. They announced last summer that an election would be held, they decided the date, they chose the method of casting ballots. The Coalition wasn't even remotely involved.
...if you don't want to hear about them, shouldn't you quit bitching about the fact that you can't seem to understand them?
Hey, man. The administration was in favor of a caucus system. It was the Iraqi government that chose direct elections. Personally I think that caucuses would have been WAY better for the Iraqi people, but I also believe that even an imperfect democracy is better than none at all.
because an invading army told you to vote
What? Seriously
nowhere in the Oxford English dictionary does it mention that a nation to be sovereign has to be a democracy
You rely on a dictionary to tell you the intricacies of United States foreign policy? That might just be mistake #1.
In fact the word sovereign derives from monarchy
Um, no. The English word "sovereign" comes from an old French word that meant "empowered." In our language, "sovereign" means "possessing legitimate authority." The word has no connection whatsoever to the word "monarchy."
So spare me the "complexities" and the "moral obligations" that were so "imperative"
Okay, but
the Pentagon has said many times that they were not conducting official body counts. How can you cite an "official" count that does not exist as proof of anything?
Please read my post again, more carefully this time. The numbers I cited came from Iraqi morgue records, not from the Pentagon. Of course the Pentagon makes no effort to count Iraqi civilian casualties. How would they? When an Iraqi civilian gets caught by friendly fire or something, does that Iraqi's body get taken to a Coalition facility for burial? Of course not. It does, however, get taken to an Iraqi morgue, where they keep track of these things. Hence the numbers.
The fact still remains, your government decided to invade a sovereign country based on a claim that has proven to be false.
Um. How do you get from my "here are the various ways in which you are incorrect, and believe me when I say there are many of them" to "the fact still remains?" I mean, what with you being wrong and all, the point here is kind of that the fact does not still remain.
1. Iraq was not sovereign. It was under the iron fist of a tyrannical dictator.
2. The claims were not false; to the contrary, they were right on the money. Saddam was in flagrant violation of the terms of the 1991 cease-fire. He was actively pursuing proscribed weapons. He was actively engaged in terrorism.
See? Between #1 and #2, the "fact" does not still remain. You're wrong.
Just because Saddam was a bad person does not give you nor your ilk the right to invade another country
The fact that he was in violation of the Safwan Accords gave us the right. The fact that he was a bad person gave us the responsibility.
Then he wanted phony parliamentary elections that the citizens couldn't participate in.
... riverbend)
I think you're thinking of the argument over caucuses versus direct elections. The administration was in favor of a caucus system, while some others wanted direct elections instead. I bet the people of Iowa would be surprised and disappointed to hear that you think caucuses are "phony."
It's only because the (Iranian!) religious fanatic Ayatollah Sistani
Sistani is Iranian by birth, but he left that country for Iraq when he was a young man because he subscribed to a different interpretation of Shia Islam than the one followed in Iran. Also, he's not a fanatic. He's really quite moderate as Islamic mullahs go. Iranian Shia consider him an apostate, in fact. So do Wahabbists, but hell, Wahabbists consider everybody to be apostates, including other Wahabbists.
even then, the voters don't know the names of the candidates they're voting for
Yes, I agree that it would have been better if the Iraqis had chosen a caucus system instead of a direct election. But progress is progress.
Bush made sure that elections were postponed until after the US election!!!
Um. The Iraqi government picked the date of the election, not the US government.
Now he's gloating over having single handedly brought democracy to Iraq!
Wow. Project much?
And you call the left hypocritical??
No, I call you hysterical. I can understand how you might be confused. The two words are infuriatingly similar in both spelling and pronunciation.
Finally, a sobering thought on this from an Iraqi blogger
The "Iraqi" blogger known as "Riverbend" was debunked about four months ago, I think. Turns out "she" is actually a fortysomething businessman from Saudi Arabia who made up completely false stories about what was going on inside Iraq, stories that got eaten up by leftists everywhere who pointed to them as proof that Iraq was in trouble. None of it, not one word, was true. Google will help you check your sources in the future.
It kind of bugs me that your idea of "always" only goes back to 1979.
It also kind of bugs me that your understanding of the Kurdish situation is so incomplete. Turkey has a significant Kurdish minority population. Some of those Kurds got together to form a Marxist revolutionary group called, variously, KADEK, the KGK, the HSK, the KHK and the PKK. This group adopted terrorist tactics in their campaign for "independence" (it's hard to apply that word to any totalitarian socialist group).
The Kurds of northeastern Iraq, by contrast, are committed to democracy and to capitalism. The KDP and the PUK are no more allied with the Marxist terrorists in Turkey than the Turks themselves are.
And the Shia of Iraq practice a very different sect of Islam than the Shia of Iran. Put simply, the Iranian mullahs are theocrats who believe that Islam should be at the heart of government, while the mullahs of Shia Iraq follow a more insular teaching that instructs them to stay out of politics and government. The two groups are like oil and water. The odds that they would ever join together in a political union are a big fat zero.
I appreciate your interest in the subject and your desire to get to the heart of the situation. But it sounds like you've got a lot to learn.
Iraq has had elections before
No. Wrong. Never. Unless your definition of "election" includes being forced under the threat of imprisonment and torture at the hands of the secret police to write down the name of a murderous dictator who seized power during a coup. I don't consider that an election. Neither does the United States Department of State.
Was Iraq invaded so that person could vote or because there were WMD's? Just curious
Both. There were many reasons why it was both pragmatically necessary and morally imperative to invade Iraq. I'm sorry this troubles you, but at some point you're gonna have to grow up and learn to deal with complexity.
the invasion of as SOVEREIGN country
Iraq was not sovereign. By definition, a country that's ruled by a dictator cannot be considered sovereign. Only legitimate governments are sovereign.
the death of tens of thousands of civilians
You do know that the number you're citing is complete bullshit, right? The official Iraq estimate of the number of noncombatants killed between March 19, 2003 and a few weeks ago is about 7,000. (The number is necessarily a little bit out of date.) That figure comes from official Iraqi morgue records. At least a third of those people were killed by the Fedayeen in Basrah alone. Of the remainder, the vast majority have been murdered by Islamic terrorists in bombings, machine-gun sprees and televised executions.
The number you're citing comes from a widely misreported study in The Lancet. The researchers found that the number of Iraqis civilians (not, repeat not non-combatants, but merely Iraqi citizens who were not in uniform when they were killed) killed since 3/19/03 was anywhere between 9,800 and 198,000. Irresponsible (or maybe just ignorant) journalists just split the difference and reported that "tens of thousands" Iraqis were killed.
This is, in point of fact, absolutely untrue. Just to summarize, it's untrue because (1) since the study was based on simple extrapolation, the margin of error on the Lancet study was so wide as to make the study useless, and (2) the Lancet study included every Iraqi who was not wearing an Iraqi military uniform when they were killed, meaning that at minimum several thousand Iraqi soldiers and members of the Fedayeen were wrongly included in the study.
Sigh.
Show of hands: Who here is sick and tired of this "You gave us your property for free, but rather than being grateful we're going to be pissed off that you held something back for yourself" attitude?
Is it just me?
What good will come from this?
This article has produced thousands of page views, which directly translate into advertising revenue. Consequently, the people who operate the parent company that operates the parent company of the company that owns the "Slashdot" brand and that pays the staff's salaries will get to sleep on slightly bigger piles of money.
If you don't think that making fat cats even fatter is good, then the terrorists have already won.
Which is why, in the rest of the world, we were horrified by Bush's "you are either with us, or you are with the terrorists" speech.
I don't understand. Are you saying that you were distraught that interminable fence-sitting suddenly became unacceptable to the people on the one side of the fence who were under sustained and imminent threat of being murdered by the people on the other side of the fence?
If anyone can see a motive for the invasion of Iraq past keeping the American economy propped up by assuring the supply of oil (and, tangentially, making the interests that the Bush family represents billions), please present it to me.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Not to mention trade or the common defense. Anybody who denies enjoying US citizenship should discard all possessions that weren't manufactured or produced in the United States, and also should immediately report to the nearest British, French, Spanish, Mexican, Austrian, Turkish, German or Japanese embassy to apply for citizenship in one of those countries. It doesn't matter which one; at some point in the past two centuries, our federal government has defended us from them all.
It's not just about benefits and entitlements. We literally owe a debt of gratitude for our very liberty to the federal government which so often has employed the economic, diplomatic or military might of this nation to secure it for us.
The basis of our philosophy is that all people are entitled to certain basic civil rights, and that among those are the rights to life and liberty. We also recognize other fundamental civil rights like the right to own property and the right to religious expression.
These rights aren't granted to us by anybody. We're endowed with them by our Creator. And they're not just reserved for the citizens of a particular nation or the members of a particular class. Everybody has them.
This belief lies at the very basis of our entire political and social system. It's axiomatic.
You can express the opinion that you don't think that's how it should be, if you want to, but good luck. People have been trying to do that for hundreds of years now, and nobody yet has been able to.
the PATRIOT act has provided a means by which the government in the USA can more easily harrass those saying / printing / broadcasting ideas it does not like
... which is exactly the sort of speech that was supposed to have been chilled. So the mere existence of this point of view is evidence of its invalidity.
Depending on how you look at it, that's either blatantly false, or true of every law we have.
Yes, the Federal government has the power to conduct investigations when terrorist activity is suspected. Does that translate into "the USA can harass you?" No, it does not. And if you really bend your definitions and conclude that it does mean that, then you could say exactly the same thing about every other law on the books.
it can now more easily punish such people with less dependence on legal niceties - hence the chilling effect.
How many times do I have to say it? There has been no chilling effect. None whatsoever. All there's been is a bunch of people sitting around on their fat asses talking about a chilling effect
the patriot act has a chilling effect on the freedom to read by state enquiry into reading
That's not a correct statement. If there were a "chilling effect" --there clearly has not been; library patronage remains unchanged --it would have been attributable to the wild misrepresentation of what USA PATRIOT actually was and what it actually did than by anything that was actually in the law itself.
And gag orders are most certainly not violations of the First Amendment. They're a situation in which the freedom to speak has to be balanced against the public safety, or against the right of the accused to receive a fair trial. They're not even slightly controversial.
You want to put an end to "chilling effects?" Stop running around claiming that they sky is falling. It isn't, and if you're doing anything at all, you'd doing more harm than good.
As to "why we're in Iraq," I think that this quote sums it up nicely:
If what happened [on Sunday] in Iraq is screwing up the world, then we've got to figure out how to screw it up faster.
(Seen on the same blog I cited above.)
I thought it was accepted /. mantra that the patriot act has a chilling effect on free speech.
Oh, it very much is. It's an article of faith in numerous echo chambers. It is not, however, true in any way at all. As is patently obvious to anybody who's ever, you know, read the damn thing.
Sigh.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Recognize that? It's the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. That's not an excerpt. That's the whole thing, every word.
The First Amendment is not a declaration. It is a law, a law that prohibits the Congress of the United States from passing certain types of legislation. None of the amendments are declarations. They're laws that help to define the scope and jurisdiction of the power of the federal government.
The Constitution, in Article V, defines the process for amending the Constitution itself. Any part of the Constitution can be amended, as long as the process is followed. Entire chunks of the Constitution as they were ratified in 1789 are now null and void, having been amended in the years since. The first part of Article I section 3, for instance, no longer applies; it's been replaced by the 17th Amendment.
Because the first 10 amendments are part of the Constitution, they, too, can be amended, as described in Article V. If we --as a country --wanted to change the way the First Amendment is worded, we could do that. If we wanted to get rid of it altogether, we could do that too. Because we, the people, make the rules. We are not permanently bound to a document that was written more than two centuries ago. We can change it in any way we see fit.
So that whole "the first 10 articles of the Bill of Rights are NOT amendments" thing is completely wrong. And the "the first amendment can't be altered or abolished" thing is also completely wrong. Not a little bit wrong, not right in substance but wrong in detail. Like completely wrong.
Oh, you're wrong about citizenship, too. It's right there, in black and white, in the 14th Amendment: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. That PDF you linked to is all funny-business, and about as academically rigorous as those manifestos by dim bulbs who claim that they don't really have to pay income taxes because of some obscure technicality of the law that only they understand. It's armchair law from armchair philosophers and deserves no consideration whatsoever.
Children go to school to learn about the freedoms that adults enjoy, not to exercise them themselves.
What the ABC News/Washington Post poll, which dates back to September 2003, actually said was that about two-thirds of Americans agreed at the time that the poll was taken that it was at least possible that Saddam Hussein was complicit in 9/11. There were five choices given: Very likely, somewhat likely, not likely, not at all likely and no opinion. Because of the way the question was worded, anybody who didn't fall into the "no" or "I don't know" camps was forced to give a positive response. The sum of the two positive responses was added up, and the front-page headline read "Americans think Saddam was behind 9/11," when the poll showed no such thing.
Here's an article by a blogger who explained all that in detail.
Given the facts of the case -- that one of Saddam's top lieutenants was personally involved in the meeting in Kuala Lumpur where the masterminds behind the attack finalized their plans --it is entirely reasonable to admit the possibility that Saddam has some level of complicity or involvement in 9/11. When polls show that most Americans hold an entirely reasonable opinion, some people see it as an opportunity to decry the American people as fools for admitting a possibility. I find that kind of sad.
And does the First Amendment still feel the same after newly introduced Bills like PATRIOT ACT?
Um. Yes, it does. Because USA PATRIOT had nothing to do with the first amendment, you see. Completely unrelated to that particular piece of law.
Conspicuously omitted as well are a Fibre Channel adapter, a 30" LCD panel and 64 G5 processors running at 10 GHz each.
I don't think your understanding of the word "crippled" is very good.
Letting someone export a song to other formats does not in any way require them to store multiple formats on their servers.
Um. Yeah, it does. You can't go from AAC directly to MP3 without throwing away a significant amount of data. You have to go from AAC to AIFF and then to MP3, and then you have to encode at a much higher bit rate. Even so, due to the fairly crappy nature of MP3, you lose a good deal of sound quality in the process.
Going from AAC to AIFF, of course, is lossless; you don't lose anything. And going from AAC to AIFF and back to AAC is also effectively lossless. But going from AAC to another compressed format is a train wreck.
Seems like somebody who "knows technology" would, you know, know this.
The GUI, not the mouse, on OS/X renders it useless to my mind but since I don't own a Mac and only have to use one for work occasionally ...
Sure didn't stop you from jumping to an utterly wrongheaded conclusion, did it?
Thank holy God in Heaven above that you're not in any kind of position to dictate Apple's policies or product roadmaps. You've got what has to be the worst idea I've ever actually seen in print.
It's worth pointing out that Jef Raskin was the inspiration for the Macintosh, but he really had very little to do with its development. So saying that "even Jef Raskin thinks it was a mistake" doesn't mean anything. He thinks everything about the Mac was a mistake, because he had something entirely different in mind.
Number of Mac-team-designed computers shipped: Upwards of 40 million. Number of Raskin-designed computers shipped: Um. How many Canon "Cats" ever made it out the door?
Frankly, if people get 'confused' by a two or three button mice, then they shouldn't be using a computer in the first place.
Nothing says "my opinion is valuable and worth hearing" like a spew of unbridled elitism.
Your mac mini arguement is stupid.
Ow! My irony gland just exploded.
Defending the one-button mouse is like defending the Iraq war. It's an exercise in futility.
Speaking of irony, how wonderful that you should make a comment like this today, on the day of Iraq's first free election ever. Millions of people got to vote today for the first time in their lives.
The war needs no defense. Its virtues are obvious to all who care to open their eyes and look at them. Just like the one-button mouse.